Aldo Leopold Quotes

The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.

Governments at all levels and the whole society should act more vigorously to protect the land our lives depend on.

You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.

To sustain an environment suitable for man, we must fight on a thousand battlegrounds. Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore.

Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.

Good stewardship of the environment is not just a personal responsibility, it is a public value... Our duty is to use the land well, and sometimes not to use it at all. This is our responsibility as citizens, but more than that, it is our calling as stewards of the earth.

There are some monuments where the land is so widespread, they just encompass as much as possible. And the integral part of the - the precious part, so to speak - I guess all land is precious, but the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil, will not be despoiled. But there are parts of the monument lands where we can explore without affecting the overall environment.

Conservationists have, I fear, adopted the pedagogical method of the prophets: we mutter darkly about impending doom if people don't mend their ways. The doom is impending, all right; no one can be an ecologist, even an amateur one, without seeing it. But do people mend their ways for fear of calamity? I doubt it. They are more likely to do it out of pure curiosity and interest.

People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better... They don't know it, but they're losing nature. They don't see that they're going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

Preservation of our environment is not a liberal or conservative challenge, it's common sense.

What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.

I think that our cooperative conservation approaches get people to sit down and grapple with problem solving.

Conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics..

… as a nation we haven't expected our government to show foresight in the development of the land. We have allowed individuals to do as they thought best and they could hardly be expected to have an altruistic attitude on the future. Now we are faced with lands that must be returned to buffalo grass or trees in order to prevent the suffering which many of our people are enduring today. All of us will gladly help in the emergency but I hope we will do more than that, and set ourselves to studying the things which have caused these conditions and never rest until our government remedies them.

Conservation is not without its critics and opposition. There are a lot of special interests that don't want to see land set aside.

Despite my great disappointment in American foreign policy, I am very proud of the American tradition of wild land conservation. It is the best tradition and example of land conservation in the world. It goes back a long way.

I think now, with our technology, our capacity to grow food, our ability to stop raping the Earth and destroying the ecology and killing off fellow creatures, we have a chance to bring a new harmony and a new path to human development.

The recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster.

Facts have proved that prosperity at the expense of the environment is only delaying disaster. We cannot passively protect our environment by simply stopping economic development.

We only have this one planet; we got to figure out how to live on it without destroying it.

The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.